Khôra - Holographic Dreamtime
A soundtrack for embracing the fear of the dark...
23rd January 2020
cstrecords
My Rating:
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8.0
/10
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REVIEW
Far from your usual dark ambient project, this album offers up the typically rich atmosphere through a lense of noise and psychedelia, providing for an experience like no other than is far more interesting as a sum of its parts than broken down track by track. For the most part, this album's strengths come from the curious combination of organic drum sounds displaced against the stammering synth pads and unsettling chimes. It is an album that speaks for itself purely on the basis of its premise, but is gratifyingly backed up by genuinely compelling music; the key to this working is that the strong ideas have strong execution.
Now, the flaws come from what I hinted at before, how despite the excellent experience this provides when you do break it into its individual tracks they won't hold up - but I'm looking at this as an album, and shall judge it as such. Yes, there are weaker moments in the tracklist, particularly the misfire that is "Upon A Plexus", but the titular track in particular proves that Khôra can make individual moments stand out, even when that isn't the album's point. Perhaps most impressive is the conclusion, the final three tracks offering their own subset of sounds that compliment each other and function better as a trio than the whole album does, the atmosphere purposefully compromised in favour of more grating sounds that build and climax on the closing "The Geometry Of Resonance", ending the album with a sharpness it initially lacked.
Overall, this album can make for a thoroughly interesting listening experience, particularly for people who adore soundscapes and a dark kind of ambience as I do. Where it stands out is in its fusion of typical ambient tropes with elements of noise and psychedelia, the former being especially notable on the fantastic closing trio of tracks. Of course, the downside to the incredible cohesion this record has is that individual tracks can be hard to distinguish and will often fail to function as well on their own, but it isn't something that matters if you're listening to the record as a record.
TRACK RATINGS (/10)
1. The Timepiece And The Mirror - 7
2. Cozens Of Identity - 7
3. Upon A Plexus - 4
4. Holographic Dreamtime - 8
5. Overcoding - 7
6. A Countenance Of Meshing Waves - 7
7. I Am A Tongue Of Spectral Void - 6
8. A Body's Wisdom Is Alien Science - 7
9. Knowledge Is The River Lethé - 8
10. The Geometry Of Resonance - 8
BREAKDOWN
Ambition: 8
Atmosphere: 10
Catchiness/Enjoyability: 6
Content/Ideas: 8
Emotion/Engaging: 8
Execution: 8
Production: 8
Structure: 7
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Aesthetic: 8
Arrangements: 9
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Total: 80
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Listen to the album
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